Teamed up with cousin Henry Kravis and fellow Bear Stearns colleague Jerome Kohlberg to form leveraged buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts 1976. Winning strategy: use junk bonds to buy underperforming companies, rework balance sheets, sell for profit. First billion-dollar deal: Wometco 1984. Kohlberg exited 1987. Best known for famed $25 billion RJR Nabisco buyout 1989. Barbarians at the Gate took Thomas Frist's HCA private with Bain Capital and Merrill Lynch Global Private Equity last year for $33 billion. With David Bonderman and James Coulter's TPG and Goldman Sachs, agreed to buy power firm TXU for $45 billion in cash and assumed debt a few months later; deal expected to close later this year. In 31 years firm has invested in 150 companies; total transaction cost exceeds $280 billion. Net profits last year: $1.1 billion. Last year raised $5 billion on Amsterdam Stock Exchange for publicly traded limited partnership investing in western Europe. Filed to go public earlier this summer.

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